Member Newsletter Spring 2017 Training Tip of the Month! Back-to-back sessions are a great way to train your body to get used to the feeling of changing from swimming to cycling or cycling to running. Also known as a brick session, practicing two disciplines directly after each other will make you a lot better, both physically and mentally, come race day. Issue Highlights: Welcome New Members Dates to Remember REV3 Quassy Race Report Coasty s Corner! Get to know fellow club member, Mark Smith Welcome New Members So glad you joined us! Ian Rintel Tammy Moreiro Mike Jaoude Sandra Ricciuto Scott Chick Annmarie Mercieri Danette Jones Christina Pinola Rohan CH Rodrigo Fernandes Make sure you visit the club website www.gctri.org for all sorts of good info including the club calendar, list of member discounts, training plans, race finders and much more!
Mark Your Calendars! Social Events Sunday May 7 th @ 11am Picnic at Palisades Park! After ROCK THE RIVER RACE, we will have a club picnic. Running the race? Hooray! You're already in the right place to join the party. All other members come spectate or swing by around 11am. BYO food and drinks. Educational Seminars Being held on both Saturday, April 22 nd (8am) and Sunday, April 23 rd (10am): Tire Changing and Bike Handling Clinic 1. Meet at Fort Lee Historical Park 2. Practice changing tires 3. Bike handling and water bottle grabs 4. Then an optional No Drop C ride either to the Market (25M total) or Spoon/Pie Lady (35M total) get a coffee and ride back 5. Optional lunch at Hirams on the way back to Hoboken. Weekly Group Workouts Every Tuesday Morning - Track Workouts at the Weehawken Waterfront Park Track: Meet at 5:45am at 9 th St. & Park Ave. in Hoboken to run as a group to the track or meet at the track at 6am. Workouts are provided and all paces are welcome! The group is usually back to Hoboken around 7am. Every Thursday Morning - Group Bike Rides to Palisades Park: Meet at 5:40am outside the 14th St. Ferry in Hoboken on Frank Sinatra Drive. The ride takes about 1 hour (to the park and back on River Road) to 1.5 hours (with optional hill repeats at Ross Dock). All speeds are welcome! Weekend Group Rides and Runs: We encourage all members to post group workouts on the club calendar and share to the club Facebook page. Weekend workouts are usually posted by Friday each week. FOR MORE DETAILS: http://www.gctri.org/race-calendar/
Quassy Race Report By Matthew J Bach www.ironmattbach.com Rev3 Quassy is a well-run weekend long event that offers an Olympic distance (Saturday) and Half distance (Sunday). The venue is great, especially for those who have kids and want to hang out with the family at the park afterwards where they have a bunch of carnival-type rides and games. It typically has around 1000 competitors so it's not big and intimidating like an Ironman event (typically 1500-3000 participants) but definitely larger than a local sprint (typically ~100-200 participants). It's easily driveable at about 2 hours from Hoboken. It has a beautiful but challenging bike and run course that serve as very good prep for Ironman Lake Placid, especially due to the timing of the race at about 7 weeks before Placid. These notes are for the half iron distance (which I've done three times), but most of these are applicable to the Olympic distance event too. Ask club members who have done the Olympic if you want to know some of the nuances of that race. Pre-race (day before and morning of) - Parking is great here. Quassy is an amusement park designed to have lots of people on site at the same time, so it has a big grass/dirt lot right near the entrance to the park. It's not like other races that require shuttles or long walks. Another perk making logistics easy is that T1, T2, the start and finish are all within a few hundred yards of each other. They'll have you assigned to a start wave with other members of your age and gender, so be sure to note which wave you're in to be there on time. You'll have to get your race packet and check your bike into transition the day before your race. Swim - Solid swim course. It's a calm, freshwater lake and always wetsuit legal with temps perfect in the 60s. It's roughly a triangle where you swim out from shore, then turn right around a buoy where the backstretch is rather long, then another right back to shore (close to where you got in). You swim straight into the sun on the backstretch so sighting can be difficult. Also note that there is a dock that juts out towards the last side of the triangle on your way back into shore. Be sure to be swimming from buoy to shore or to the right of that line, but not to the left of it, or you'll find yourself running into the dock and having to go around. You can get in the water the day before or morning of to check out the route you'll want to take. I've tended to swim pretty quick on this course relative to others. Bike - It's pretty hilly! Connecticut in general is, more so than 9w, so be ready for some extra climbing. Nothing you can't handle though! To put it into perspective, you'll climb 3800ft during the 56 mile bike leg at Rev3 Quassy while you climb 1600ft if you ride from Hoboken to just past the Tappan Zee Bridge and back, which is the same distance. The elevation profiles for the bike and run are available on the website here: http://rev3tri.com/quassy/course-maps/ Note the early climbs at mile 4 and 7. You won't want to go too hard on those or you'll feel it later. Also note the major climb of the course at mile 23. It seems to go on forever but just keep your head down, get in an easy gear and pedal away. You'll get there eventually and after that it's rolling or downhill. Be careful at mile 47. You'll be on a major descent where you can go over 40mph if you want, but there's a somewhat sketchy turn that you'll need to navigate at a slower pace. The race director will have warning signs set up for you and I believe they make it a "no pass zone." I bike at least 20 minutes slower here than I do on a flat course, so don't be surprised if your time reflects that too. Compare yourself to your crumbling competitors or yourself from previous years rather than other course times! Overall is a beautiful and fair bike course that I like a lot. Run - It's also hilly! They have, however, changed the run course to be a bit less hilly than it used to be. Expect long but relatively gradual ups and downs throughout. The last mile is net uphill so save a little for that final challenge. Another tough part about this race is that it's in early June so the temperatures may reach the 80s. It's not 90-100+ degree temps, but it's only June and since we live in NJ, you haven't had a chance to acclimate to the heat yet. The 80 degrees you may face here will feel very hot. There is also a chance you'll get a cool day though, where it may not exceed 65. There is some shade on the run course and it has a good number of aid stations. Post-race - After the race, they have a buffet of burgers, hot dogs, pasta and other backyard BBQ type food (free for athletes). They also have had ice baths and recovery boots at past events that athletes can use if they want. Rev3 events allow family members to join you as you run down the finisher chute, unlike Ironman events which are very strict about not letting people do it.
Coasty s Corner Coasty is GC Tri s Official Mascot. You can see him proudly flying at all of our races. Each month, Coasty interviews one club member to find out what makes them tri so hard Mark Smith GC Tri Member since 2011 How did you get into triathlons? In 2005 a friend called me up in September ( this is pre- smart phone era, it was an actual phone call.) after she had had her third child bemoaning the fact that she was so out of shape. She pitched the idea of doing a triathlon together ( she had been a competitive skier at one point) and without knowing too much about triathlons I agreed. We set a date and picked a race for the following June. As the race date drew close she called me again to say that she was bailing, because in the preceding months her 3 kids had flu in serial order as well as her husband, and she was not ready. I carried on with the plan solo, bumbling my way through the race which was an Olympic distance and managed to finish, getting my ass kicked in the process. I decided at that time I had do a few more of these events, and here I am today... What is your proudest accomplishment in the sport? Maybe 5 years ago I did an Olympic Race under personally terrible conditions: little sleep for 2 nights preceding the race, red eye flight back from the west coast, and not great weather on race day. I was in the worst mood possible and was thinking I would quit about every 15 seconds. I managed to spoon feed my self incremental goals like "get to the next buoy, corner" etc. and finished the race. Checking the results on the way out of the paddock after what was the worst kind of a personal hell day' I saw that I had PR'd by 6 minutes and was in complete disbelief. Persevering through a completely miserable frame of mind produced a surprising result. Finish of 2016 Newport Half Marathon What is your favorite part about triathlon? Cold beer afterwards? That's a hard question to answer. I do like the training and in the last few years I've learned much about myself from the training process. I have no athletic background so I've been figuring out how to put a race together for myself and that learning curve has been great. A friend of mine used the words "Its an honorable path to self knowledge" to describe this learning curve I ve been on and I agree with that assessment.
Coasty s Corner Continued What are your goals for this year in the sport? I'm going to do a 70.3 this year for the first time which is the main thing. After last year I decided to focus more on running so I'm adding in more running events and would like to get to a 1:40 half marathon. Improving as a swimmer is also on my list. I d say moving beyond advanced dilettante racing wise is my ultimate goal. Outside of triathlon, how else do you enjoy spending your free time? Time off is spent hanging with friends, some travel, kayaking and occasionally some crazy building project. I have a small but productive garden and grow some delicious food during the summer. What is your best piece of advice for someone just starting out in the sport? How do you balance your training with family and work? This is the hardest thing for me. Up until about 2011 I didn t do a lot of racing, and training was spotty. Some years I did not race at all. After my daughter finished high school, I had more free time and started doing more races and this is about the time I joined GCTRI. Family wise balancing training is not so hard, but balancing training with work is crazy. I'm self employed and my schedule is extremely variable, can involve lots of domestic as well as international travel and the work I do tends to have long days that can be stressful. In 2015 I lived on a small ship for a month in the South Pacific during the month of June. So not only did I take a zero for the month training wise, I also can't make up the training gap in a couple of weekends when I return from a work trip like that. Basically I have to weave in training around work schedule which is anything but regular and makes training plans for things like 70.3 sort of useless. I do the best I can given the circumstances and when I have the time tend to put in more training hours. When I started in Triathlon it was a solo endeavor, I was reading some books about tri's and just having a bash at it. I think the best thing some one starting out can do is join a club like GCTRI and get into the culture, learn from the people there, shared suffering builds bonds and strengthens the learning. Training with other people certainly makes the long rides and runs more enjoyable and for those of us who are on the less disciplined side, making a date with a friend for some training event vastly increases the chances of attaining your goals. Jumping rope Aboard Nai a in some rare calm waters near Fiji. If you would like to nominate a team member or volunteer yourself to be featured in an upcoming Coasty s Corner, please email Nicole at nogrosso18@gmail.com